The silence was the most terrible sound Rudra had heard in a while.
There was no sound of wings beating — something that, till now, Rudra had considered absolutely necessary to keep something as large as himself afloat in the air. There was only a feeling of pressure dropping as his ears painfully popped. The temperature also fell a few degrees, as if the very air around him held its breath.
Even with his enhanced vision, Rudra didn't actually see the avian. He just noticed the stars, once sharp and bright, suddenly vanishing — like something dark and large swallowing the entire sky for a moment.
Whatever it was, Rudra didn't, couldn't, wait for it to strike first. His instinct took over before his thoughts caught up. He turned his head and opened his mouth. His jaw unhinged wider than any earthly creature's had a right to, and from somewhere deep in his chest, past the cage of his ribs, a heat surged upward — the ancient lineage of his draconic blood taking control of the body as he faced something somewhat far more terrifying than Percival Leonhart had been with his Sword of Mamon in his past life.
He vomited out a column of molten orange-white fire — so bright that it temporarily wounded the eternal darkness of the night.
So bright it was as if he had swallowed the sun during the day and was now vomiting it back out in molten form, igniting the air itself on its path to the target.
The flame met the dark shape mid-air.
A screech tore through the sky so loud that it sent an invisible wave through the air, making Rudra stall, batting his wings as his vision went blurry. He heard Nayan crying too — the sound probably far more intolerable to her human ears than it was to his draconic ones.
But he held the line of fire. Not out of caution. But out of sheer habit.
The screeching never stopped. It seemed the pain didn't stop the creature — it fed its anger. For a second, Rudra could make out pieces of the avian that had caught his fire. Feathers — black and glossy even with flame crawling across them. And talons. Massive, curved things eerily similar to his own.
Worst part? The fire didn't stop it. Not really. The creature kept coming, pushing against the searing heat like it was cutting through a fast-flowing river.
Rudra doubled down.
He dug deeper than he had a second ago, past the first surge, into the place where the fire wasn't a breath anymore but something closer to blood — thick, molten, dragged up from wherever inside him it lived. His throat burned with it, the vivid red of it pulsing brighter beneath his scales, veins of ember light spreading up his neck like cracks running through a furnace wall about to give.
The column widened. What had been a spear of flame became a flood, roaring out of him in a torrent that lit the clouds from beneath, painting the underside of the night in shifting orange and gold. The heat of it rolled back against his own face, scalding even through scales built to survive worse. His wings strained to hold him steady against the recoil, the sheer force of the exhale nearly pushing him backward through the air.
It wasn't controlled anymore. It wasn't precise. It was everything he had, thrown at a target he could no longer see clearly through the shimmer of his own heat — every ounce of draconic blood in him screaming up his throat and out into the dark, because holding back had already cost him the element of surprise, and he refused to let it cost him anything more.
The fire came out so fast and hot that Rudra felt his draconic core throbbing under his ribs like a second heart. It was not painful, nor was it even uncomfortable. But it was a first. He had never had to push himself so hard against a single enemy when it came to raining down flames.
And then, just as suddenly, there was nothing left to burn.
The fire guttered, the flood thinning back into a stream, then a breath, then silence — his chest heaving, throat raw, the taste of ash and iron thick on his tongue.
And the force met nothing.
It was gone — nowhere in the path of fire.
And then he heard the screech to his left.
Before he knew it, a mass of feathers and talons crashed against his side, sending him tumbling through the air. Nayan shrieked from above as Rudra tried his best to regain his balance — not for himself, but for his General.
And then he felt it. Two spots on the side of his stomach burned like someone had stabbed him with heated iron. The agony dug deep into his flesh.
Rudra roared — Wrraaghh! He craned his neck to snap at whatever had latched onto his side.
It was then, through the haze of pain and shock, that he saw the creature clearly for the first time.
It was enormous — wingspan easily rivaling his own, maybe wider, black feathers drinking in what little moonlight remained instead of reflecting it, as though the creature had been cut whole from the negative space between stars. Where his own fire had caught it, the feathers hadn't burned so much as scorched — edges curling to ash-grey, threading smoke that peeled off its body in ribbons, and yet beneath the damage the plumage still moved, still shifted with each wingbeat like nothing had touched it at all.
Its head was wrong in the way old gods were always wrong — not quite eagle, not quite anything Rudra could name. A hooked beak, black as obsidian and twice as sharp, sat beneath eyes that burned a deep, molten gold, twin embers in a face otherwise built of shadow. There was no white to those eyes. No pupil he could find, either — just gold, endless and furious, fixed on him with something that looked disturbingly close to *hatred*, older than anything that should have been possible for a creature this young to hold.
Its talons were the worst of it. Longer than Rudra's own foreclaws, curved and blackened at the tips like they'd been forged rather than grown, and even now buried into the meat of his side, dark blood — his blood — welling black in the moonless light. Muscle corded along its legs in ropes thick enough to crush stone, and Rudra understood, with a cold and sudden clarity, exactly how those two burning wounds had opened.
Around its throat and shoulders, feathers gave way to something else — a mane, almost, dark and coarse, more beast than bird, catching the last dying light of his fire in threads of orange. It made the creature look less like a bird of prey and more like something stitched together from several apex predators, none of them willing to give up their claim.
It didn't look burned. It didn't look beaten.
It looked angry.
And its eyes — its eyes were something that made a shiver run down Rudra's spine. They were brown. Not mud-brown, nor like the bark of a tree — too bright for that. It was a brown like deep, fine dirt, the kind you'd only find if you dug at least six feet underground. A pair of eyes awfully familiar to him.
It was the same eyes his mother had.